desire for reality, it tries to arrive at the real roots of this process of moral perfection and desires to know how to create to-day the ethic of the producers of the future.
II
At the beginning of any research on modern ethics this question must be asked. Under what conditions is regeneration possible? The Marxists are absolutely right in laughing at the Utopists and in maintaining that morality is never created by mild preaching, by the ingenious constructions of theorists, or by fine gestures. Proudhon, having neglected this problem, suffered from many illusions about the persistence of the forces which gave life to his own ethics; experience was soon to prove that his undertaking was to remain fruitless. And if the contemporary world does not contain the roots of a new ethic what will happen to it? The sighs of a whimpering middle class will not save it, if it has for ever lost its morality.
Very shortly before his death Renan was much engrossed with the ethical future of the world: "Moral values decline, that is a certainty, sacrifice has almost disappeared;one can see the day coming when everything will be syndicalised,[1] when organised selfishness will take the place of love and devotion. There will be strange upheavals. The two things which alone until now have resisted the decay of reverence, the army[2] and the Church, will soon be swept away in the universal torrent."[3] Renan showed a remarkable insight in writing this at the very
- ↑ Renan is complaining that the corporative associations dominate society too much. It is clear that he had none of the veneration for the corporative spirit that so many contemporary idealists display.
- ↑ He did not foresee that his son-in-law would agitate violently against the army in the Dreyfus affair.
- ↑ Renan, Feuilles détachées, p. 14.
of J. J. Rousseau or Robespierre would suffice. We know to-day that such means have no moral efficacy.
